Financial geography I: The state-finance nexus

Abstract

In the first of my reports on financial geography, I focus on a growing body of work that engages with the state as a vital and strategic actor in financial markets and in the global economy. After the 2008 global financial crisis, austerity measures and impacts on public finance have reshaped local-central government relationships with increasing use of financial instruments and market solutions. The growing prominence of sovereign wealth funds, shifting roles of national development banks and central banks, and impacts of currency internationalisation are raising questions about new forms of financial statecraft and opportunities for changing configurations of global hegemony. Taken together, a renewed engagement with a political economic lens and focus on state-finance relations illuminate the changing positionalities of economies and financial actors in the spatial organisation of international financial and monetary relations.